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EngageDigital

May 01, 2011

Against Furry Socialism

Why are furries generally always socialist?

I was just thinking -- that's really the case. I can't think of any furry capitalists. That is, there was Shaun Altman, but he was a crook. He used to hustle land, poker tables, and of course made the fake stock exchange that collapsed -- so I guess he was a capitalist. Shaun wasn't really a true furry though. Most organized furries *are* socialists.

Think of Michi Lumin and the Luskwood furries. I'll never forget when the Lindens FINALLY started reforming the group tools, after several years of enforced socialism -- groups were set to have votes for officers, then officer recall if you didn't like that person if they became a "tyrant" ostensibly (it was never used that way), and of course forced distribute of proceeds from land or object sales. The furries were furious that the Lindens were going to change out their initial hippie tools and make them more compatible with life. For one, there was that evil "officer recall" which was just sheer collectivist terror. It enabled people who paid tier to be voted out of their own group and expelled from the group land -- it was just awful.

I will never forget the time I was griefed by Chad Statotsky (who, not surprisingly, later became Shaun's boyfriend) who joined my open group, then engineered "officer recall votes" on me in my groups, so that I was frozen from acting in my group where I owned most of the land. (The wrecker Juani Wu did the same thing in the Metaverse Justice group, forcing officer recalls on me repeatedly to try to get me out of the group.)

Back in the early days, I hadn't figured out to put alts in every group at first and had a terrible time -- and when I complained about this form of sinister griefing to Blue Linden, he said, "Well, you'll just have to campaign to win the trust of your group" -- as if I had to run for election in order to...keep land that I had paid for myself, and held the tier on. It was awful -- these Lindens were such hippies. Anshe Chung tipped me off: that if I were expelled from my own group, if I kept an alt within the group with invite powers, that alt could then invite me back. Of course, in a group with multiple warring officers, there were constant shenanigans with this feature.

It took lots and lots of work to get the Lindens to change their early hippie ways. This blog post I wrote at the time was actually read by Cory Linden and I think the Lindens did finally realize that if they were going to have real-life businesses in their world, they had to deflect some of the enforced hippie stuff.

Like the ability of anyone made officer in your land to be able to manage it also being able to sell that land out from under you or transfer the land out of the group to his own group, a frequent griefscapade in those days. Like the forcible transfer of all income to the group equally to every member regardless of what their contribution was or whether they even logged in. There was no granulation.

Daniel Linden, who was something of a hippie himself (he was for leaving the Goreans to make their own laws and if any of their victims complained, letting their sim managers take the complaints), wanted to have groups that could accommodate any lifestyle, whether BDSM dom running everybody rigidly or hippie collective or families businesses in between -- but it took some doing to get him to see the destructiveness of some of the group tools even for their stated collectivist goals (a problem one still has with Soft Linden and his inability to admit and validate the problem of returning objects in shared on group land, which destroys non-copy objects).

So I'll reprint this discussion here as the mods might get it given how flightly the personalities are involved. Remember that awful Pussycat Catnip?

When the Lindens announced the abandoned land thing, I wrote this on the thread:

"No, it is not a positive change to introduce a huge and sudden glut of land into an already devalued land marked -- this is communism, whereas Second Life is supposed to have a capitalist free market simulation."

There are quite a few suck-ups in this thread praising the Lindens because they can only think in terms of what they see in front of them, and if there is abandoned land with junk on it in front of them, they think, by all means, let's have all that stuff go to sale automatically.

Pussycat gives me the usual hippie socialist crap:

"SL is supposed to be a world where we get together and play with each other and create things. That it has a market at all is only secondary. The nature of what that market evolves into is dictated by the primary goal of bringing people together to play and create, and is not 'promised or guaranteed' to be any particular model or ideology."

Sigh.

Supposed to be? Fuck that shit.

My reply:

"

No, no, no.

There is absolutely no concept that says "Second Life HAS to be a sandbox" and "the market is secondary".

None whatsoever.

That's only one perspective -- and usually happens to be the furry perspective, BTW (Luskwood, e.g.)

But it's very wrong to impose this on the entire world.

That's the feature of capitalism versus socialism -- if you have capitalism as the basis, socialism can deviate and mooch off it. But if you have socialism as the basis, capitalism is suppressed. So that's not freedom.

If you want a collectivist sim, then, make one. Do not impose that on everyone else who wants normal market sims.

The Lindens are in business to sell sims and currency. And it's more than fine that some of us, are too. If we weren't, they wouldn't be. It's just that simple. The market sustains those who want to play collective farm -- and that is what is secondary, not the market. The market is primary, and that's how it should be to sustain the world.

By claiming "it is not promised or guarantee to be any one ideology" in fact you are cleverly trying to impose one idea -- the "no market" sandbox idea, and act as if the market is "secondary" or "optional". It's not. It's fundamental.

Since time immemorial, real-life human societies have made markets and bought and sold at a profit. It is only with brutal force is this disrupted in some places at some historical periods (i.e. Soviet Union, 75 years).

The tabula resa is the market; the sandbox is built on top of that as a deviation.

The primary goal is not "to bring people to play with each other and create things". That may be your goal; it may be some people's goal. It isn't even the formal mission of LL, if you read it, which says something like "to connect us all to a virtual world to better humanity".

But it doesn't matter even what the original framers think -- SL is too big, too diverse, and too free, fortunately for us all, to have to be under the yoke of collectivism.

Now, for the literalist collectivists out there, no, saying that the primary model should be capitalism isn't merely "imposing your world model on the world".

And that's because, as I just said, if you set the model default as capitalism with freedom, then you can create a restriction within it, with nerdy little socialist notions, within that context -- socialism on one sim. Wantfrieswiththat, which is Gwen's socialist paradise, is a good example of that concept -- it's capitalism-sustained with the owner, who has a good income in RL, as the backup.

Which brings me to a funny point about Michi. When we were doing that excercise of meeting in groups and making proposals to the Lindens, back when they used to work that way (imagine!), Michi INSISTED that there be collectivized ownership built into the tools -- that there not be one owner only. She absolutely HAD to have uravnilovka (forced levelling) so that her collective of furries in Luskwood, who shared their tier or whatever, could all be co-owners.

The Lindens made a system that had the ability of the initial owner make the decision to turn other officers into owners with owner powers just like him -- but it had to go in sequence. First one owner, then he turned on the other owners.

The result would be the perfect collective farm soviet that Michi dreamed of -- except she couldn't bear the sequencing. She insisted that the Lindens have a system where it occur simultaneously. But this just wasn't possible. You had to have one person found the group, then add others. It was just too complicated (and a completely crazy and hardly used edge case) to insist on everybody in a group simultaneously pulling the lever to form their collective. Michi bitched and bitched about this on the forums.

I kept pointing out the obvious: that if you make markets and individual rights be the tabula resa, you can branch off and make your socialisms and BDSM and Gor kingdoms off that basis, but it wouldn't work visa versa. If you kept the socialized hippie tools SL originally began with, you couldn't granulate the circulation of money, for example. Some people want group vendors or group objects to pay out only to people who worked in the group or contributed, not to every member/customer/tenant/role-player.

How is it that furries came to be socialist? Is it that they imagine this to be a more primitive form of organization?

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Comments

Apotheus Silverman, the guy that built SL Exchange/xstreet. And he frequently attended what could only be described as "capitalist meetings" in SL where "capitalists" discussed ways to improve profits.

"Since time immemorial, real-life human societies have made markets and bought and sold at a profit."

Capitalism is a relatively recent development - it didn't fully supplant feudalism in Europe, for example, until the mid-nineteenth century.

There's a good argument that the social relations in Second Life are essentially feudal in nature. It certainly falls well short of an ideal free-market bourgeois republic, what with the absence of secure property rights, and the Lindens' lack of democratic accountability and arbitrary use of state power.

There is nothing inherently anti-capitalist in the right of recall over elected officials - just ask Arnold Schwarzenegger. In theory it's just a question of good governance. Of course it doesn't work out like that, in real life or in Second Life, due the underlying class conflicts, but that's another story.

But Luskwood *is* a business. They sell avatars. And just because they engage in commerce doesn't mean they are capitalists committed to a free market. They aren't.

Well, that's a good example, Apotheus, founder of Slexchange.com (bought by the Lindens).

Is he the norm or the exception for the furries?

Also, why did he sell to the Lindens and become a Linden? I guess that's how they do it in the software world, but he ended up, being let go, no? (Have to check).

So, did he make a profit all those years, or was it a labour of love? Did he pay himself a living wage? Did other people earn a living wage? These questions will likely never be asked, but like all of us, he probably ate a lot of costs and sometimes "put his check in the drawer" so to speak. Given that I don't pay myself a living wage even for a part-timer, I'm not a thriving capitalist either, and if not a socialist, something of an hobbyist, I guess -- it's that newfangled microcurrency business that has sweat equity for ever and ever and barely covers its own costs...how many people are like this in SL?

See, there's a difference between Anshe Chung, who made sure Anshe Chung got paid, and someone like me or someone even like Apotheus, who I imagine didn't make enormous amounts off this highly labour intensive microcurrency market. By tying the accounts to inworld accounts and having the mass marketing space that Apotheus didn't have, the Lindens probably have wrested more profits off it, but doesn't it even pay for the Lindens who have to run it, who require real salaries and benefits?

I suggest everyone who agrees with individualism and capitalism to take action on Prokofy's well written post here. Flood Michi Lumin's IMs with the notion that she can take her commie kumbayah BS off of our SL, as Luskwood and furries have been a parasite on Second Life for as long as I can remember.

Flood Michi Lumin's IMs with the message that furries need to get lost or run back to their hidden sims where they belong, and go to her area, Luskwood, and shout that communism and drum circles are not going to rule the day . . . simply say . . . "I am an INDIVIDUAL and I will not bend to your socialist agenda. My accomplishments will not be buried and distributed. Down with Michi Lumin and Get Luskwood OFF OF SL!!! !!!"

@ObfuscatorRand, Go be butthurt somewhere else. I never really got the 'cool to hate furries' movement.

If you want to hate somebody. Hate somebody useful like the pedophiles. 99.99% of furries keep to themselves and don't bug anybody else. I've personally have a LOT more problems from SL residents that AREN'T furries than I have that were.

Sounds like the author of this article had problems early on and Michi is just a convenient scapegoat, since most of the information is a flat out lie. Especially the Luskwood=socialists part. Michi has no problems with making money... Trust me on that.

And I also bet most of you don't realize just how much the 'evil furries' have contributed to things like making viewer2 not suck so bad, etc.

So I think you all need to get off your high horses and get on with life. If you want someone to hate and blame for your problems... Look in a mirror.. There's the real culprit.

You know, in the real world, things can't always be broken down into capitalism vs. communism.

When are you going to get over something that happened YEEEAAAARRRSS ago?

If this was really about freedom of the market, then let groups take on any form the users want. There should be groups with and without officer recalls and whatever hippie/non-hippie nonsense. Let the best groups win. Luskwood seems to be doing quite fine for itself, and so are you. Move on. Enjoy life instead of bitching for years and years and years about one person who never did anything to you personally.

I didn't say that Michi Lumin supported "officer recall". I don't know what she thought of that. But she definitely supported the group hippie tools as they were, and was upset that ownership was now going to have a function that would confer powers on other people in a granulated way that would make them "unequal". I imagine she got over it eventually.

Saying that furries tend to be Ayn Rand supporters doesn't somehow obviate the point about socialism, which is ultimately a point about suppression of freedom and heavy and rigid ideology.

Ayn Rand is a reactionary to the Bolsheviks. But she is just like them and is cut from the same cloth in her methods and culture. The ends justify the means for her as well as the Bolsheviks. She is godless, like the Bolsheviks. She is for the "art of selfishness" which the Bolsheviks claim to reject under their collectivism, but in fact they spawn the worst kind of selfishness.

Yes, she seems to be all about self-reliance, the individual, and so on. And yet, there is this cut-throat terroristic element to this extremity that doesn't even create a concept of "the public interest" which is required for a civil society that helps preserve freedoms for all.

And example of this in SL is Intlibber. He believed that landowners should have savage security orbs set for the full property and not leave any easements for boats to pass by if they owned water. Not even 32 meters could be cut or freed up as an easement in his book. That's what I mean by the extremity of Randianism -- he's a particular extreme form of libertarian singularism replete with "cosmic engineering" aggrandizement.

I read Ayn Rand's works when I was 13-14 and went through a phase of being interested in them, but then like people outgrow communism or socialism of their youth I rejected it. Rigid, selfish, extreme, uncaring. It is not what my faith teaches, which is that you have to do good works and have faith in God, not merely expect that the weak die out or fall by the wayside and the strong survive. Darwinism has never been proved to be applicable to culture or politics, even if applicable to physical bodies.

I really find much of Ayn Rand offensive. I can think of one quote I think is useful, however:

"“Civilization is the progress toward a society of privacy. The savage's whole existence is public, ruled by the laws of his tribe. Civilization is the process of setting man free from men." Ayn Rand

All well and good, and a good antidote to the primal collectivism of communism (which is why communism and socialism are backwards and not progressive).

But, in addition to being able to free people up from the village, the tribe, the net-nanny, they must be able to freely and voluntarily construct civic organizations that pursue various common goals, not in coerced collectivism, but collaboration. And Ayn Rand doesn't seem to have a theory for such collaboration. Her individual is like a god-man trumping other men's individuality.

So I find that in these furries (and Soft Linden is a very, very good example), the socialistic impulses of open source and sandboxing and group builds and tribal furriness co-exist with these Randian beliefs in social Darwinism, opposition to government interference, etc. Soft Linden has mystical homages to both open source technocommunism AND Ayn Rand on his profile, and he brandishes that about to tell us he's no communist, but only a communist could oppose the acknowledgement of group perms violated by the "share" return bug.

Of course, in his mind, what his return of the prim he doesn't like is all about is this grand dramatic pose, where the Architect, the Howard Roarke, returns the prim that doesn't fit, like a sculptor, even if it is somebody else's prim -- they are a lesser being.

But in order for this Grand Gesture to even be available as a pose for the Howard Roarke wannabe, the item first had to be collectivized. That's how technocommunism and libertarians verging on Randianism often go hand and hand, weaving through different issues of complementarity.

Also from this same playbook is the "no business but my business" (or "our business") shtick -- oldbies who want oligarchic monopolies on this or that sector of the economy and want to make a profit themselves, but who hate land barons whom they think "make too much money," or who hate free accounts or newbies or foreigners who compete with them, etc. They want not a free economy that would enable competition and multiple forces to thrive, they want a Renaissance Faire where there is a limited access controlled by the masters they suck up to, the Lindens.

I don't buy the story that "evil furries" contributed to making the viewer "not suck so bad".

UNIMPRESSED.

I generally don't have a problem with furries. I give them a wide berth. I don't like the concept, like I don't like BDSM, but I don't find it as immoral or unlawful -- it is still degrading of human dignity nonetheless. But I don't care to cross the people playing furry and I don't really follow them.

As soon as one of them steps on my foot, then I fight back. So that's why I'm doing now.

Obfuscator is just a troll and a fake name. I resist Michi and other furry socialist ideals, but I'm definitely not for flooding them with IMs, or raiding their sims, or doing a damn thing. I'm opposing their ideas on my blog; I'm not for harming them in world.

So trying to do faux-incitement against them is retarded, it's just Woodbury infantalism.

Capitalism v. communism is hardly out of date but constantly relevant, more's the pity. You would think a tired discredit ideology that had led to the massacres of hundreds of millions would be finished, on the dustbin of history, but it lives, online, in the form of technocommunism.

Capitalism isn't just one ideology or one form of model and it is flexible enough to persist through the ages successfully, and it has self-correcting mechanisms.

No group should have officer recalls. It's a crippling, evil thing that has never, ever been used for good in SL. You can organically remove officers by other means if truly they become "a tyrant". This is an example when code-as-law leads instantly to abuse and tyranny.

As for group tools, yes, there should be groups of any type. But for that, you can't have the hippie model be the default, or it suppresses freedom. It must be only one option.

I agree with Reason.. Let the groups decide what management style they want. It's not your place to tell them what they they should do. By doing so you become just as tyrannical as those you (unjustly and without factual basis) accuse now.

And also FYI.. Pure capitalism is just as flawed a concept as pure communism and actually the eventual outcomes of both are quite identical.. A few with great wealth and the vast majority living in poverty. Capitalism only works when regulated with safeguards.. which by definition, makes it not really capitalism.

"Capitalism is a relatively recent development - it didn't fully supplant feudalism in Europe, for example, until the mid-nineteenth century."

Capitalism existed long before the world was coined and defined. Markets exist in all societies. Even in the Soviet Union they had an underground black market. Thousands of years ago humans were trading food, tools, skins, etc.

Some form of free market is the only way to have individual freedom and prosperity. All other economic systems use force to regulate labor.

As far as furries go, I don't personally know of any that are socialist. I also couldn't say if I've ever been in Luskwood. I just haven't discussed economic or political philosophy with that many furries.

@Amanda Dallin: Luskwood is very careful about politic debates, at least on social platform, in general chat. In past it brought up many arguments and never ended well. Also imagine that even two friendly, broad-minded residents discussing it and some fundmentaistically tuned one would came in and offended by what they say. Result? SOme say that Luskwood is full punks, other - socialists , communists and all other variety of "colorful labels", which often used for anti-furry propaganda. So if you'l met situation that me or other Luskwood founder will ask you to move discussion to IM or to try avoid it, it's not from our snobism or anything, it has social security reasons - to gove people place where they can talk of anything but troublesome and stressing things and protect them from disturbance of griefers and trolls.